Dame Gillian Beer was recently King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Her books include Darwin’s Plots, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. She was Chair of the Poetry Book Society for four years, and has (twice) been a judge for the Booker Prize as well as the Orange Prize and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Both a writer and a critic, she is currently President of the British Comparative Literature Association and on the Council of Arts Council England, East. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and recently gave the Poetry Society Annual Lecture (2007) on 'Rhyming as Intimacy, Rhyming as Radicalism’.

 

More information: Dame Gillian Beer speaks to Donald MacLeod of The Guardian about Woolfe, Darwin, and other interests.